We checked into the hotel about 45 mnutes ago and within 5 minutes our wireless network from home was up and running and super fast.  Sometimes I love technology.. It seems as if there aren’t too many iBurst users in Bloem because the network speeds are pretty cool compared to at home in Joburg.

Its the first time I’ve been anywhere and taken my internet and wifi router with me… Its super geeky, but its cool.

We could have used the hotel’s wifi, but its damned expensive. So now we can sit at the pool surfing the net wirelessly without paying an extra cent. 

So I just laughed out loud at work, thought “Oh my gosh that sounded just like Leo Leporte” and almost said it out loud when I realised that nobody in the office would get it since they don’t listen to TWIT (This Week In Tech).    It was silly, but it got me thinking about how listening to podcasts can really separate you from “common culture”.  Most people in the office will talk about the latest jokes from “The Rude Awakening”, or other radio stations while I’m talking about the podcasts I listen to.

Thought 2:

A friend of mine just updated his GeoCaching website – GeoCachingRanking.com.  It’s writen in .Net and does some cool stuff to get its stats about which cachers have found new caches.  Their old  site had Google maps to show where certain objects were in the world, and a bunch of other fun stuff like that. Most of their data is taken from either scraping data off images on GeoCaching.com or by parsing XML files that GeoCaching.com mails to them containing information on caches.  Its pretty cool considering its a part time hobby of theirs and the fact that it is making quite an impact in the local caching community.

[IMHO just lost my blog entry - it posted it, but the contents were blank, so here's a 2nd attempt]
I just read via the Daily Grind that Component Factory have just released the Krypton Toolkit.  Its basically a set of windows forms controls that are written for .Net 2.0 and VS.Net 2005, and best of all they’re free for commercial use.

I’m going to go and download it now and check it out.

[And for the .Net bloggers out there, if you blog about their release you can get a free copy of DotNetMagic - check out the offer here.]

I have an i-mate SP3
- I’ve had it for about 6 months now – and the one thing that’s frustrated
me the most is the fact that it doesn’t have Windows Media Player 10 on it, so
certain cool features of WMP 10 wouldn’t work (like auto synchronising playlists
with the phone)  Anyway, I just checked the i-mate website and lo and
behold, there’s a new version of the OS for my phone and it includes (amongst
other cool things) WMP 10!  It apparently breaks some functionality with
some bluetooth based GPS devices, but since I don’t connect my phone to anything
bluetooth related, I don’t mind at all.

The only problem with this is that I’ll have to re-install all the apps I’ve
put on my phone, kinda like re-installing the OS on a PC… At least I’ll be in
control, unlike the phone OS upgrades I’ve had with previous phones where the
“service centre” just wipes all your data, I’ll be able to back up everything
and make sure I don’t lose any important information.  Its also cool that
it synchs with Outlook so all my contact info will be safe…

I know the last time I upgraded my phone software I had to re-name my phone
because ActiveSync believed it was still partnered with my “pre-upgrade” phone,
and wouldn’t create a new partnership with my “post-upgrade” phone. 
Unfortuantely I can’t remember how I worked around it, or what I should do now
to prevent it from happening this time.  So I’ll make sure I post a blog
entry about it for future reference.

I just read an IT Web article on the SA entrants to the Imagine Cup.  For those who don’t know, Microsoft South Africa has run Project Firefly for a number of years… Its basically a software development competition amongst SA Academic institutions.  The Imagine Cup started after Firefly and is an international “version” of the competition.

I was fortunate to meet the guys from PE who are going to Japan this week for the international competition.  Their system looks amazing!  I had no idea that people at varsity had the ability to write such cool and useful software in .Net.  Their IDS (Intrusion Detection System) is damn awesome in what it does, and they’ve done some amazing work on it.  I know its not from some big name that we can all trust, but after hearing them talk and seeing a demo of some of their project I seriously think they have a winning product.  If I was a system admin I’d seriously want some of their features on any IDS I bought for my company.

Imagine sitting at home on a weekend, and getting a message on your iMate phone or other Pocket PC based phone to tell you that a user’s PC is being used to hack your network.  For most people that would be good enough, but in this case it goes further.  Rather than having to get to a PC or rush into work, you can quickly and easily disable their account, shut down their pc, etc, right from your phone.  Just push a few buttons and get back to watching the game/braai/beer/etc.  No stress, no hassle, network intrusion averted.  This example is just one of the many super cool things that their system does!

Aparently they have only got 15 minutes to present their project in the first round, and 10 minutes in the 2nd round (excluding a 5 minute demo).  I have no idea how they’ll get that right because they could spend hours talking about all the features they have.  Aparently they built most of their UI controls themselves, so their UI is really cool and was made locally!

Needless to say I’m VERY impressed and I hope they get the top spot in the competition!

Today is the first of four days this month where you get 10 free minutes of SkypeOut calls.  Check it out on their site – Skype, or via Skype Journal.

[Update: Aparently the promotion started yesterday, so their 24 hours is over.  I'll try and be a bit faster in posting the next time.]

PS: I was using my i-Mate and the memory stick I got from Leaf to listen to the show, its seriously better than listening to the radio during the 1.5hrs I spend in the car each day… Oh, and while I’m on the topic of radio shows, check out DotNetRocks - episode 110 (I think) has Kimberly Tripp talking about SQL Server 2005 – and for a chick, she’s darn clever.   Just kidding, but its kinda refreshing to hear a female geek speaking about tech stuff – there are so few of them out there!  Check out Episode 110 its cool.

I’m loving my i-Mate (co.za site) more and more the longer I use it.

I hope it went pretty well for the guys that were there…  I certainly enjoyed giving the talk.

Here are the promised notes/slides/samples.

The PPT is here and the code samples are here.  The PPT’s have word for word what I wanted to say.  The samples are all there, I’ve included a file “demos.doc” which are my notes to myself telling me what to show to the guys.  I didn’t include instructions to myself to tell me to copy DLL’s from one folder to another (which I needed to do in the Dynamic UI demo).

The whole reason I wrote out word for word what I wanted to say was so that even if you didn’t go to the talk you could get the slides and demos and step yourself through it.  (My aim was to put in enough info so that someone from another town could take the slides, notes and code and with a few modifications they could present the material themselves…) 

If there are any hassles, let me know.

I got my new motherboard on Tuesday… (after like 2 months of waiting before I ordered it, and another month after I ordered it) So on Wednesday after the talk I decided to install it.  Little did I know what I was in for.  Firstly I couldn’t get my PC to “see” both my hard drives… In the end it turned out that I had plugged in the wrong cable… Then XP didn’t like the motherboard so it wouldn’t start up – in fact it would just keep rebooting the PC.  I finally found my XP cd and managed to boot from that, and I thought I’d go to the Repair Console… which was really not a whole load of help… Eventually I managed to get the CD to try and repair the installation… but it hung after about 5 minutes of work. It took me a good while to realise this, by which time it was about 2am and I needed to sleep.

Lack of sleep the night before and the late night caused me to oversleep quite badly so Christie and I  didn’t go to the Pilanesberg like we’d planned… But we had a pretty cool day anyway. (Found a nice shop in the Broadacres centre that sells cool wooden puzzles) Last night I tried again to fix my XP… only to find that it needed my CD key, and since we’re house sitting at the moment I didn’t have it with me (I only took the CD from home).  So I’ll try again this evening.

At about 8pm as we were going to get supper, I got an sms from an old friend of mine (Matthew) who told me that another old friend of mine (Lynn) was on The Apprentice…  So I had to stop to watch that… Also the one dude who almost got kicked off (Nthato) was aparently at my old school while I was there.  Anyway, the girl’s team won, so Lynn is still in the game for next week.

I also got the memory card for my phone on Wednesday. So being without a pc at home I’ve had to wait till today when I’m back at work to try out putting music, etc on the phone.  I thought it was going to be a nightmare because with only WMP9 on the phone, WMP10 on my pc wouldn’t sync nicely with it.  But it picks up the device and it will even sync with it.  What’s even cooler was that I was under the impression that I’d have to sit and convert all my WMA files to a lower quality so that I could fit them on my phone… but I found out that if you’re tryiing to sync too much WMP will convert the files for you… But I didn’t want to wait till I ran out of space before I started making my files smaller, so I chose the option in WMP 10 where you specify for yourself what is the max quality you’ll allow on your phone.  I’ve gone for 64kbps, which is bad for audio fundi’s but considering that I’m just listening to audio talk shows and music while I’m in queue’s and out and about, I’m not complaining.  It’s even working with Audible.com’s player so I can listen to my audio books while I’m out and about… (I just need to figure out how to get more than 2 minutes 39 seconds of audio onto my phone at a time. )